Life on Mars?

Separating fact from fiction

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If asked ‘What was the hot media topic of 1996?’, many would reply,
‘The sensational claim that scientists have discovered life from Mars.’
It certainly dominated the newspapers and television channels for some time. The
news has been great publicity for NASA, just when the US Congress was discussing
funding cuts.

The timing of the announcement was brilliant, coinciding with the release of the
blockbuster movie Independence Day, about an extraterrestrial invasion
of Earth.

The possibility of life on Mars has fascinated many, including the wealthy American
astronomer Percival Lowell, who erroneously thought he had discovered hundreds of
canals by 1908. But when the Viking spacecraft visited Mars in 1976, no trace of
life was found, despite sophisticated detection techniques.

Many articles have proclaimed that this latest ‘discovery’ would, if
confirmed, disprove traditional Christianity. They argued that life on Mars would
show that matter has an inbuilt tendency to form life. Thus, a Creator is unnecessary,
and the Earth and humanity are nothing special. However, the professing evangelical
President of the USA, Bill Clinton, was very enthusiastic, saying, ‘If this
discovery is confirmed, it would surely be one of the most stunning insights into
our universe that science has discovered.’1

What was actually found?

No-one has found life on Mars; the announcement concerns a potato-sized rock on
Earth (from Antarctica). This rock, thought to be a meteorite, contains tiny globules
which superficially resemble bacteria in shape, and certain chemicals which supposedly
came from once-living organisms. Note that the most which is being claimed is evidence
for fossil microbial life, not ‘little green men’.

Did the rock really come from Mars?

We do not know for sure, although about the only thing most researchers agree upon
is that it did. The gases trapped inside the rock’s tiny pores reportedly
match today's atmosphere on Mars (argon and carbon dioxide). However, its mineral
composition differs from that of the 11 other meteorites believed to be martian,
and it is reportedly (according to evolutionary dating methods) several billion
years older than these other 11. But it does have the same distinctive oxygen isotope
ratio, which has supposedly remained unchanged for ‘billions of years’.
This is evidence that they all may have come from the same parent body, but is not
conclusive. For a rock to escape Mars’ gravity, its speed would need to be
over five times greater than that of a rifle bullet.2 Some scientists
believe an impact from a large enough object could cause this.

Was any life actually found?

One of Australia’s most ardent atheistic sceptics proclaimed ‘Mars life’
as a fact, and, without the caution one would expect from a scientist, used it as
an excuse to launch another tirade against scientists who believe the universe and
life were created. But the facts do not justify his dogmatic claims.

Some of the structures in the rock are unusual, and are shaped a bit like some bacteria.
But you cannot judge most things by their outward appearance. The chief researcher
for one team examining it admitted that such shapes could represent dried-up mud.

A huge problem with the alleged fossil bacteria is their tiny size — many
times smaller than all known free-living bacteria.3 The Martian objects
simply do not have enough room to pack in all the information needed for a self-reproducing
cell.4 This is why William Schopf of the University of California, LA,
a leading expert on microfossils, said: ‘I think it is very unlikely they
have remnants of biological activity.’

Most people don’t know that another team which analysed the same rock
found that it lacked a key sign of biological activity. The leader,
Jim Papike, director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico,
said: ‘When we looked at the ratio [of two types of sulphur], there was no
evidence that it was in a ratio for life forms.’ In fact, he said that the
ratio pointed in the opposite direction.5

So why did people think life was found?

Tiny globules of minerals called carbonates, with even tinier oval and tube-shaped
objects on the surface. Limestone and marble, for example, consist
mainly of carbonate minerals. However, the key paper6 concedes that ‘The
origin of these globules is controversial’, and that they could have formed
by processes unconnected with life. In particular, there is some evidence that they
were formed at a temperature far too hot for life.

Molecules called PAHs (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons,
many of which are strong cancer-causing agents). However, these molecules are not
always produced by living things. They are commonly found in soot and diesel exhaust.
Also, 'PAHs are very widespread compounds in asteroids and not diagnostic of life'
according to Robert Clayton, a geochemist at the University of Chicago. He also
pointed out that PAHs in fossils have about a thousand times the variety of those
in this rock.7

Another possibility is that these chemicals are from Earth and contaminated the
meteorite once it was here. Richard Zare, who headed the chemistry team, tried to
rule out this explanation because there are more PAHs deep inside the rock than
on the surface, whereas contaminants would tend to affect the surface more than
the inside. But Robert Gregory, a geologist at Southern Methodist University points
out that water could seep into the many fissures in the rock and concentrate PAHs
on the inside, while those on the surface would be destroyed by UV light.8

Certain iron compounds. The rock contains a mineral called magnetite,
also called lodestone (which was used in the first compasses), as well as another
mineral similar to 'fool's gold'. These minerals can be formed by living organisms
or by processes having nothing to do with life. It is the occurrence of these minerals
together which suggests (to some) that they were formed by living cells. But the
researchers haven't ruled out all possible non-living processes.

Would life on Mars prove particles-to-people evolution?

Many sceptics have committed a logical error, because even if life were actually
found on Mars, it would not prove that it had evolved there.

First, it could not rule out an Earth origin for that life. After all, if rocks
can be blasted from Mars to Earth, it should be possible to blast them the other
way.9 A less dramatic possibility, which scientists have considered for
years, is that spores from Earth were pushed out of the upper atmosphere into space
by light pressure, especially during a solar flare. Therefore, the alleged Martian
life could originally have been seeded by Earth life.

Second, evolutionists have not succeeded in showing how non-living matter can jump
the many hurdles required to form living cells.10

What does Scripture say?

The Bible does not explicitly say that no life was created outside the Earth. Some
Christians of yesteryear, e.g. the British scholar Richard Bentley, even theorised
that God’s omnipotence and glory might be expressed by many planets with life.11

However, it must be noted that most supporters of ET life have a strong evolutionary
bias, as pointed out at the beginning of this article. Both Carl Sagan and H.G.
Wells wrote books supporting evolution and opposing Christianity. It is tragic that
millions of dollars are wasted on seeking complex signals from space which would
prove an alien intelligence, but such people refuse to consider that the complex
signals of our DNA and protein point to an Intelligence which made us. It is also
sad to see President Clinton virtually pledging billions of dollars to help the
space program because he thinks some shapes and chemicals in a rock show that life
was on Mars. Yet in the USA, millions of dollars are spent, with his approval, killing
unborn human babies with heartbeats and brainwaves, because he presumably maintains
that they are not alive!

Scripture strongly implies that no intelligent life exists elsewhere, and
the millions of taxpayers’ dollars spent on SETI projects have failed to refute
this. The Earth was created purposely to be home for humans. It was on Earth that
humans rebelled against their Creator and brought the cosmos under the curse of
death and decay (Romans
8:22). It was also the place where the Creator took on the nature of one
of His creatures, died for their sins, and rose from the dead. It would therefore
seem hard to reconcile intelligent life on other worlds with the Fall and the Incarnation.
It would also seem odd for God to create microscopic life on other planets, but
we should not be dogmatic on this.

Summary

The media speculations about ‘life on Mars’ were premature, to say the
least. Some researchers in the field believe the evidence is actually against any
life. Some have suggested that the claim is a publicity stunt by NASA to gain more
Government funding. At most, the evidence is only vaguely suggestive of microbial
life. If so, there is still no reason that this could not have had an earth origin.

These dubious claims about ‘life’ in a rock are a smoke-screen, hiding
the fact that true life is only found in the Rock (Isaiah
44:8), and that the only way to eternal life is through the chief Cornerstone,
Jesus Christ (Ephesians
2:20, cf.
John 14:6,
Acts 4:12).

The American biochemist Harold Morowitz calculated that the smallest hypothetical
minimal cell we can envisage is about 100 nm across. This would contain three ribosomes,
a full complement of enzymes, a DNA molecule 100,000 bases long, and a cell wall.
He points out that this ‘is almost certainly a lower limit, since we have
allowed no control functions, no vitamin metabolism and extremely limited intermediary
metabolism.’ Principles of Biomolecular Organisation, eds. G.E.W.
Wostenholme and M. O’Connor, London: J.A. Churchill, 1966 p. 456. Cited in
Michael Denton: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Bethesda, MD: Adler &
Adler, 1986, pp. 263–264.

This would be more difficult, because Earth’s escape velocity (11.2 km/s)
is over twice that of Mars. Also, rocks from Mars would be attracted by the Sun's
gravity, so would be more likely to intersect Earth’s orbit. On the other
hand, the Sun would tend to attract Earth rocks away from Mars’ orbit. But
the possibility still exists, discussed in this magazine well before the Mars announcement
(18(3):7). The mechanism outlined in the text, of spores transported
by the solar wind, would favour Earth to Mars transfer over the reverse.

Let us assume that Mycoplasma is the simplest self-reproducing organism
(although as indicated above, truly free-living organisms are even more complicated).
It has 482 genes coding for enzymes about 400 amino acids long on average, Science270:445–6, 20 October 1995. Each enzyme must have a precise
sequence to function properly. There are 20 different types of amino acid that occur
in enzymes. Even if only 10 units had to be exactly right in each enzyme, the chance
of getting the full set by ordinary random chemical combinations is one in 106271
(one followed by 6271 zeroes). This is effectively nil when one realises that the
number of atoms in the universe is only about 1080 (one followed by 80
zeroes). Some evolutionists try to explain away these odds by invoking natural selection,
but this requires self-reproducing entities to start with, so cannot explain their
origin.

Lance Morrow, ‘Viewpoint: Life as Divine Cartoon’, Time, August
19, 1996, p. 83.

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